by Jim Lobe
via IPS News
The surprise accord reached by the U.S. and Russia in Moscow Tuesday to try to convene an international conference to resolve the two-year-old civil war in Syria as soon as the end of this month has been greeted with equal measures of hope and scepticism.
If nothing [...]
via Lobe Log
by Robert E. Hunter
“Then we’ll have done all we can.”
“Very heartless.”
“It’s safer to be heartless than mindless. History is the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.”
Yes, [...]
via Lobe Log
by Charles Davis
US President Barack Obama today condemned the Guantanamo Bay prison camp run by US President Barack Obama, channeling the moral outrage last heard on the 2008 campaign trail.
“The idea that we would still detain forever a group of individuals that have not been tried, that is contrary [...]
via Lobe Log
by Dina Esfandiary
In a letter to Congress last week, the White House confirmed “with varying degrees of confidence” that chemical weapons had been used in Syria. This has led to a flurry of assertions that something must now be done – Bashar al-Assad’s crimes cannot [...]
by Barbara Slavin
via IPS News
It’s no wonder that Egypt has floundered in its efforts to create a more democratic system from the ruins of the Mubarak regime.
A sweeping new history of Middle Eastern political activists shows that the search for justice has deep roots in the region but has often been thwarted [...]
by Jasmin Ramsey
via IPS News
A White House letter Thursday to Congressional leaders suggesting chemical weapons use by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has reignited debate about direct U.S. military involvement in the war-torn country.
“Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the [...]
via Lobe Log
by Mitchell Plitnick
US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel may have insisted that the latest sale of US arms to Israel sent a strong message to Iran, but the actual message was a bit more restrained. Hagel made a point of emphasizing that the arms sale reaffirmed the close ties between [...]
Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter
by Tom Engelhardt
via Tom Dispatch
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 — and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies [...]
Interview with Colin Kahl by Garrett Nada
via USIP
What steps would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear weapon?
President Obama has estimated that it would take Iran “over a year or so” for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. But that device would likely be crude and too large to fit on [...]
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